'Old-Line' Citizens Disconnecting To Own Democratic Institutions

'Old-Line' Citizens Disconnecting To Own Democratic Institutions

by

Pierre Tristam

The anti-immigration debate in the early 1990s was differently tinted from today's. Back then undocumented immigrants were fewer. But legal immigrants were surging in and, it was said, refusing to integrate -- to shed their culture and embrace America's. Anger was focused on their "multiculturalism."

The anger deflected from what, in retrospect, was an embryonic variant of the anti-immigration hostility we're seeing today and the backlash it's provoking among immigrants. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the great historian who died four months ago, diagnosed the hostility in "The Disuniting of America," his 1992 book on multiculturalism: "When old-line Americans, for example, treat people of other nationalities and races as if they were indigestible elements to be shunned and barred, they must not be surprised if minorities gather bitterly unto themselves and damn everybody else." It wasn't foreigners, in other words, who were sowing disunity. Nor is it foreigners, then or now, who are lacking trust or confidence in those democratic institutions that "old-line Americans" want immigrants to embrace.

Earlier this month the Gallup Organization released its latest survey of Americans' confidence in their institutions (See box). The numbers are not too different from what they were 10 years ago, but news stories focused on one item: Congress' all-time low rating. Conservatives gloated with we-told-you-so sophomorism, Democrats having won back Congress in November. But the gloaters miss the point.

Americans are in a lecturing mood about immigrants refusing to integrate. But it's "old-line Americans" who are disassociating from their own democratic institutions, whether it's the three branches of government, the Fourth Estate, the criminal justice system or the educational system.

The contrast with Americans' love of uniforms and their addictive dependence on force is startling, even as the last few years have been flattering neither to the military nor to domestic police forces. Torture, brutality, massacres and routine humiliation of civilians have bloodied the military's operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As if taking their cue from the Pentagon's disturbingly popular excesses, domestic police forces are growing more militaristic, more uncompromising and brutal in the name of control above all, even when children are involved. The New York Times' Bob Herbert has been documenting the rise in police brutality and repression of children nationally, but Central Florida has its own examples, whether it's the police killing of 8th-grader Chris Penley at his Orlando middle school last year -- for wielding a toy gun -- or the use of a Taser on a special education student in a Flagler County high school in January. Yakov Smirnoff's "what a country" punch line comes to mind: We're growing more Soviet every day.

Democracy's customs carry on. Candidates campaign. Voters half-heartedly vote, half-heartedly buy newspapers, watch the news in diminishing numbers. They listen in on cable's and talk-radio's many shout shows. But that's not democratic discourse or conversation. It's the sound of one hand clapping. The "disuniting of America" Schlesinger wrote about in the 1990s here seems more pronounced, and more gravely so, because it's from within. Democracy isn't politics alone. It isn't just the campaigns and the elections but what happens the other 364 days throughout the nation's democratic institutions, and how connected people feel to those institutions in a republic that "embodies ideals that transcend ethnic, religious and political lines" (as Schlesinger wrote).

That the only institutions Americans feel truly connected to, or at least confident in, are primarily nondemocratic, authoritarian, force-driven and designed in large part to kill, repress, punish or, in religion's case, evoke submission, should make us wonder: Are we truly a free people? In words, certainly. In reality, we run around chanting about freedom but everywhere we beg for chains -- for ourselves, and more ominously, for our neighbors.
Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net or through his personal Web site at www.pierretristam.com .

Further

Academics are increasingly, ingeniously fighting back against an Orwellian "Professor Watchlist" aimed at exposing "radical" teachers. The list has inspired online trolls to name their own suspects - Albus Dumbledore, Dr. Pepper, Mr. Spock - and a Watchlist Redux to honor not trash targets from Jesus to teachers daring to "think critically about power." Now 100 Notre Dame professors have asked to join the list in solidarity, proclaiming, "We wish to be counted among those you are watching."